Last time round, 'fusion' seemed to be a good reference point
for Bandulu. At its best, their debut LP 'Guidance' was jazz-trance, as if Joe
Zawinul had ended up band-leader of Tangerine Dream instead of Weather Report.
Tracks like "Tribal Reign" offered supple rhythms and musky, aromatic
synth-swirls that opened up your senses like a night in a rainforest. This
time, though, dub reggae seems to be the watchword. Thankfully, Bandulu avoid
the crass, sterile replication perpetrated by most ambient dub bands, and
approach a genuine dub-house merger. On "Agent Jah", the groove-scape
wavers and warps like a horizon through a heat-haze. "Shutdown" is
even more minimal: it's little more than a beat in a reverb-chamber, the drums
kicking up a slipstream of whispery particles and after-images. It's strangely,
pleasurably reminiscent of early house classics like Royal House's 'Party People' or Nitro
Deluxe's 'This Brutal House'.

What's cool about Bandulu is that their
production isn't crisp and dry, like most techno, but the aural equivalent of
vaseline-on-the-lens. In "High Rise Heaven", a synth-figure billows,
buckles and bulges; it's as woozy and unfocussed as My Bloody Valentine's
"All I Need". "Phase In Remix" is even more Op Arty, making
you squint your ears and hallucinate patterns where none exist. Devoid of a
beat, the track atomises melody and rhythm into a myriad motes of sound, a
sussurrating and scintillating spangle-scape. It's like being swathed and
swaddled in the Milky Way.

"Antimatters" has its fair share
of non-events, like the train-kept-a'rollin' trance of 'Presence'. The best of
the rest are those tracks which verge closest on outright dub. "Original
Scientist" has echoey piano-chords, squelchifarious water-pumping
percussion and a rootical synth-figure, but tempo-wise is still house music.
"Run Run", though, could almost be a time capsule from the
mid-Seventies--sonically, it has the slow'n'low sway and mirage-like, gilded
glory-haze of King Tubby or Joe Gibbs,
while the sampled chorus warns that Babylon's days are numbered, 'cos
"revolution will come". Evidently the Bandulu boys feel that being dedicated herbalists makes them honorary Ras
Tafari.

Like "Guidance",
"Antimatters" is intermittently brilliant. As a CD, it's just begging
to be re-programmed into a sublime six track sequence of edited highlights.

Thursday, December 28, 2017

An idle glance at the weekly music papers, and you might
think that the only thing happening in rock is the likes of
Oasis (refried Sixties-isms + lippy Northern arrogance = a
band whose sole raison d'etre is to be BIG). Beyond the
hype-odrome, however, there's still a host of groups who are
committed to pushing the envelope. On both sides of the
Atlantic, the weird shit is still hitting the fans.

In the US--where rave has had little impact on rock and
hip hop is considered the cultural property of African-
Americans--weirdo bands shy away from hi-tech like samplers
and sequencers. Inevitably, this means they must turn to the
past for sources to pillage: acid-rock, Krautrock, post-punk
extremists and eccentrics like Pere Ubu and The Fall...
Avant-rock bands in America tend to be schizo-eclectic: they
join the dots between past pinnacles of extremity, try to
find and fill the gaps in their record collection. Reviewing
this music inevitably obliges you to drop a 1000 names. And
so Mercury Rev's excellent EP "Everlasting Arm" (Beggars
Banquet) comes with liner notes by David Fricke that, quite
appropriately, reference Brian Wilson's 'Smile', Syd Barrett,
Gil Evans, Van Dyke Parks and Sly Stone--all to describe the
5 minute title track. The 34 minute "Deadman" is itself pure
homage, roping in Alan Vega from Suicide to deliver a psycho-
monologue amid a noir-ish, Tom Waits/Bernard Herrman
backdrop. (Shit, I'm doing it now).

Another sector of adventurous eclecticism in America is
lo-fi--bands like Pavement, Truman's Water, The Grifters,
and Sebadoh. The latter's latest "Bakesale" (Domino) retains
the genre's trademarks (fuzzed-up guitars, sloppy, sprawling
drums, fallible slacker vox) but beefs up the sound until it
verges on grunge. I wish mainman Lou Barlow would go back to
the ghostly tape-loop experiments of his earliest days. For
that kind of homespun weirdness, you have to turn to
LaBradford and their remarkable "Prazision" LP (Kranky, P.O.
Box 578743, Chicago, Ill 60657). What to call the spectral
drone-haze oozed by this drumless duo via tape-loops, moogs
and treated guitars: lo-fi ambient? Krautrock, without the
'rock'? kosmic balladry?

Back in Blighty, Flying Saucer Attack operate on a
similarly brilliant but baffling wavelength to LaBradford.
Their second album "Distance" (Domino) is where lo-fi
Krautrock worship (FSA especially venerate Popol Vuh) meets
ambient. The title track is Aphex-with-guitars, while
"Oceans" is an idyllic expanse of serene chaos, conjured from
tribal rhythms, amp-hiss and found sounds. Other songs offer
fuzzed-up '60s psych midway between Mary Chain and Hawkwind--
entertaining, but nowhere near as interesting as FSA's more
entropic pieces.

Stereolab and Pram are often lumped in with
the lo-fi bands, because of their fetish for deliberately
antiquated synths. On their recent, chartbusting LP "Mars
Audiac Quintet" (Duophonic), the Lab's blend of muzak
harmonies, moog squelches, Marxist lyrics, minimalist 2 chord
mantras and motorik beats, is as mesmerising as ever. I love
the way they've triangulated a bizarre aesthetic universe for
themselves out of Marx, Neu! and Francois Hardy-style Gallic
girl-pop. Pram use clapped-out analog synths, home-made
theremin, brittle rhythms and dolorous fiddle to create a
magical sound midway between Aphex, Art Ensemble of Chicago
and The Raincoats. Where Pulp's use of cheesy keyboards is
kitsch, Pram sound genuinely cosmic, closer to Sun Ran than
'Magic Fly'. Appropriately, Pram's big theme is dreams of
transcendence in the face of drab provincial mundanity. And
so on 'Dancing On Star' from the new LP "Helium" (Too Pure),
Rosie trills: "one of these days I'll be up in the heavens".

Other UK bands--what I call the post-rock vanguard--have
eagerly embraced the latest technology, adding samplers,
sequencers and MIDI to the trad rock gtr/bs/dms line-up.
Laika are typical and exemplary. On their debut LP "Silver
Apples Of the Moon" (Too Pure), they sound like the missing
link between the avant-funk of Can circa 'Soon Over Babaluma'
and the 'ambient jungle' you hear on London's pirate
stations: weird samples over urgent drum-and-bass grooves,
peppered with itchy rhythm guitar and serpentine synth-
twirls, and topped with Margaret Fiedler's breathy semi-rap
vocals. Laika's music is totally anti-Luddite, yet
wonderfully organic and warm sounding.

Other UK experimental bands are forging a more frigid, anti-humanist interface with
with technology. "Isolationism", the fourth in Virgin's
best-selling series of ambient compilations, features 23
artists ranging from post-rock (Main, Ice, Scorn, Disco
Inferno) to ambient noir (Aphex, Seefeel) to avant-garde (Jim
O'Rourke, Thomas Koner, Zoviet France). What this disparate
bunch share in common is a yen for creating desolate,
forbidding soundscapes, using warped samples, effects-
processed guitars and environmental noises. With its
amorphous drone-clouds and dank sound-grottos, "Isolationism"
is a challenging but utterly compelling compendium of one the
eeriest strands of weird shit today.

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Public Image Ltd's Metal Box remembered

Frieze, November 2007

by Simon Reynolds

My most vivid memory of Metal Box dates to a week before Christmas Day 1979. My parents were out, so I sneaked Public Image Ltd's (PiL) album out of the airing cupboard, where they stashed the presents, and for the first time prised off the tin's lid, then gingerly extracted the three discs tightly crammed inside. Aged 16, I just couldn't wait to play the record that was being universally acclaimed as a giant step into a brave new world beyond rock's confines. As a result I crossed a line myself, between innocence and adulthood.

Demystification was the whole point of Metal Box's packaging, a metallic canister of the type that ordinarily contains movie reels. Like the band-as-corporation name Public Image Ltd, the matt-grey tin was an attempt to strip away mystique, all the 'bollocks' of rock romanticism. But Metal Box, of course, just added to the mystique around PiL, the group John Lydon formed after splitting with the Sex Pistols. Drab yet imposing, standing out in record shop racks or on the shelves of a collection, the can instantly became a fetish object. And although its aura was utilitarian, the packaging was actually less functional than a normal album jacket. Instead of slipping the disc out of its sleeve, you had carefully to ease out the three 45 rpm 12-inches, which were separated only by paper circles of the same size as the platters. Removing the vinyl without scratching it was a challenge. Almost 30 years later my three discs look in remarkably good nick, considering I must have played them hundreds of times. But then I was precious about my possessions: an avid post-Punk fan hamstrung by weak finances, I owned about six albums in toto, and Metal Box's hefty £7.45 price tag was the reason I'd requested it for Christmas, despite the delay this would mean in hearing it.

All this heightened the experience of playing Metal Box, giving it an almost ritualistic quality. PiL's own motivations were partly malicious pranksterism and partly a serious attempt to deconstruct 'the album'. In interviews bassist Jah Wobble was adamant that you should definitely not play Metal Box in sequence but listen to one side of a disc (two or three tracks at most) at a time. Spreading over an hour's worth of music across three records encouraged listeners to reshuffle the running order as they saw fit; as a result the record became a set of resources rather than a unitary art work. 'Useful' was a big PiL buzzword (that's what they liked about disco – it was danceable). It was a term that allowed Lydon to carry on opposing himself to all things arty and pretentious, even as he perpetrated a supreme feat of artiness with Metal Box.

Like Peter Saville's exquisitely designed releases for Factory Records, Metal Box simultaneously extended the art rock tradition of extravagant packaging (Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, from 1975, for instance) while subverting it through its stark plainness (which ironically, cost a bleedin' fortune). The only precedent I can think of is Alice Cooper's 1973 album Muscle of Love, which came in a brown cardboard carton (Lydon, as it happens, was a huge Alice fan). The concept for Metal Box originated with PiL's design-conscious friend Dennis Morris, the court photographer at Lydon's house in Gunter Grove, Chelsea, and also a member of the all-black, PiL-esque band Basement 5. Where the sleeve of the début album Public Image (1978) lampooned rock's cult of personality (Morris photographed the band in Vogue-style make-up and suits), Metal Box went one step further to a blank impersonality, the absence of any kind of image at all. Flowers of Romance (1981), the third album, took a step too far with its desultory Polaroid of band associate Jeanette Lee, but that was long after Morris had been ousted from the PiL milieu.

Morris' crucial contribution to PiL is something that comes through loud and clear in the new book Metal Box: Stories from John Lydon's Public Image Limited (2007). If author Phil Strongman is savvy enough to name his book after PiL's totemic masterpiece, he's less shrewd in doggedly pursuing the story long after the band ceased to be a creative force. As Mark Fisher has noted, every pop story, followed through to its narrative (in)conclusion, ends in ignominy or disappointment. So it is with the brand-disgracing travesties Lydon released immediately after Wobble (the group's heart and soul) and then guitarist Keith Levene (its musical brains) were ejected. More disheartening still, in a way, was the mediocre competence of the PiL albums of the late 1980s and early '90s. Still, Strongman's account of the 'good years' is rich in new data, from deliciously incongruous trivia (Ted Nugent was Levene's choice to produce the first album! Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant was mad keen to take on PiL as clients!) to more compelling revelations (the book settles the mystery of whether 'Poptones', Metal Box's stand-out track, is sung by a murdered corpse or an abduction survivor abandoned and shivering in the woods).

As so often with rock biographies, though, much of the information tends to tarnish the reputations of the protagonists. Ironically, given their fervent anti-rock stance (Lydon derided rock as a 'disease', something to be 'cancelled'), PiL's productivity was disabled by a thoroughly rock'n'roll set of failings: paranoia, egomania, money disputes, mismanagement (PiL actually had no manager, on account of Lydon's bad experiences with Malcolm McLaren; the role was portioned between Jeanette Lee and another Lydon crony, and the band's finances were kept in a box – cardboard, this time – under a bed). Equally lamentably rock'n'roll is the Spinal Tap-like procession of drummers: five in the first two years (one of whom, ex-drummer for The Fall, Karl Burns, stayed in the band for just a few days, quitting after being the victim of a dangerous prank involving fire).

All the main players (and numerous extremely minor ones) are interviewed, with the glaring exception of Lydon himself. But that's no surprise, because he's consciously distanced himself from PiL over the years. At some point he clearly grasped that his place in rock history (and future income) depended on the Sex Pistols adventure and subsequently threw all his energies into burnishing the Johnny Rotten legend. But I wonder whether another factor behind Lydon's silence is that the PiL years are painful to contemplate – not just because of bad blood (Wobble was one of his best friends) but because the music of Metal Box, rooted in his true loves (Can, Captain Beefheart, Peter Hammill, dub), meant so much to him. He really believed all that 'rock is dead' rhetoric, and was sincere when he dismissed the Sex Pistols as way too traditional. And for a moment rock's intelligentsia concurred. Metal Box's stature in 1979–80 was so immense that many commentators invoked Miles Davis' early-1970s' music as a reference point. Lester Bangs declared that he'd stake a lifetime's writing on Metal Box and Miles' Get Up With It (1974). When his apartment caught fire, the first and only thing Bangs grabbed as he fled to the street below in his pyjamas was that grey tin can.

It's the music inside that counts, though, isn't it? My other vivid memory of Metal Box is bringing it to school after our music teacher asked each member of the class to bring in a favourite record and talk about it. I played 'Death Disco' and 'Poptones', then regurgitated stuff I'd read in NME about how PiL were radical for absorbing the influence of funk and reggae. I wasn't able to articulate what made their mutational approach different from and superior to contemporaries such as The Police or indeed Old Wave rock gods such as The Stones when they disco-rocked it in 1978 with 'Miss You'. But the lasting proof of PiL's innovatory power is their music's ever-widening ripples of influence, which encompass Massive Attack, Primal Scream (they hired Wobble for 1991's 'Higher Than The Sun'), Tortoise, Radiohead and many more. You can trace a line from PiL via On U Sound (whose Adrian Sherwood had dealings – musical and, it's rumoured, otherwise – with Lydon, Levene and Wobble back then) to today's dubstep, which, like Metal Box, is Jamaican music with the sunshine extracted – roots reggae without Rasta's consoling dream of Zion.

PiL's biggest influence though, may be their rhetoric. The idea that 'rock is obsolete' (as Wobble put it in 1978) became a self-replicating meme that inoculated an entire generation against the retro-virus by directing them away from rock's back pages and towards the cutting-edges of contemporary black music. In the age of downloading and dematerialized sound-data Metal Box has a fresh resonance for me as a powerful argument in favour of the necessity for music to be physically embodied. The record was significantly diminished in its subsequent incarnation as Second Edition (the gatefold-sleeved double album it became when the 50,000 limited edition Metal Box sold out). The CD reissue, housed in a miniature metal canister, is almost risible to behold, while its digitized sound lacks the warmth and weight of the original deep-grooved 45 rpm 12 inches. Most crucially, you simply weren't meant to listen to Metal Box as one long, uninterrupted 70-minute sequence. A 1979 pressing fetches $200 through Internet sites such as Gemm; the reproduction antique vinyl reissue of Metal Box from a few years back isn't cheap either. But this is one record you simply must have, hold and hear in its original format.

More on Metal Box

Public Image Ltd

Metal Box

director's cut version, Pitchfork, November 2016

by Simon Reynolds

Public Image Ltd

Metal Box

(Universal)

Out of all the fascinating alternate takes, B-sides, rare compilation-only
tracks and never-before-released sketches that comprise this expanded reissue
of Public Image Ltd’s postpunk landmark, it’s a live version of “Public
Image” that is the real revelation. Part
of an impromptu June 1979 concert in Manchester, the song keep collapsing and
restarting. “Shut up!” snaps John Lydon,
responding to audience jeers. “I told
you it’s a fucking rehearsal.” Another PiL
member explains that the drummer, Richard Dudanski, only joined three days ago.
PiL relaunch the song only for Lydon to halt it with “miles too fast!” The
jeers erupt again and the singer offers a sort of defiant apology: if the crowd really want to “see mega light
displays and all that shit”, he advises them to go see properly professional
bands who put on a slick show. “But we ain’t like that... We’re extremely
honest: sorry about that... We admit our mistakes”.

This performance – an inadvertent deconstruction of
performance itself – takes us to the heart of the PiL project as well as the
postpunk movement for which the group served as figureheads. At its core was a belief in radical honesty: faith
in the expressive power of words, singing and sound as vehicles for urgent communication.
After the Sex Pistols’s implosion, Lydon was trying to find a way to be a
public figure again without masks, barriers, routines, or constraining
expectations. So it’s especially apt that
“Public Image” – PiL’s debut single,
Lydon’s post-Pistols mission-statement – is the song that fell apart at Manchester’s Factory Club. “Public
Image” is about the way a stage persona can become a lie that a performer is forced
to live out in perpetuity. Lydon sings
about “Johnny Rotten” as a theatrical role that trapped him and which he’s now casting
off. Starting all over with his given name and a new set of musical
accomplices, Lydon was determined to stay true to himself. The group’s name came from Muriel Sparks’s novel The Public Image, about a movie actress whose career is ruined
but who, the ending hints, is freed to embark on an authentic post-fame
existence. Lydon added the “limited” to
signify both the idea of the rock group as a corporation (in the business of
image-construction) and the idea of keeping egos on a tight leash.

A comparison for Lydon’s search for a new true music – and a
truly new music – that would leave behind rock’s calcified conventions is Berlin-era
Bowie’s quest for a “new music night and day” (the working title of Low). Indeed it was Virgin Records’s
belief that Lydon was the most significant British rock artist since Bowie that
caused them to extend PiL such extraordinary license and largesse when it came
to recording in expensive studios. That indulgence
enabled the recording of three of the most out-there albums ever released by a
major label: First Edition, Metal Box,
Flowers of Romance. But it’s the
middle panel of the triptych that is the colossal achievement: a near-perfect record that reinvents and
renews rock in a manner that fulfilled postpunk’s promise(s) to a degree
rivalled only by Joy Division on Closer.

The key word, though, is reinvention. Lydon talked grandly
of abandoning rock altogether, arguing
that killing off the genre had been the true point of punk. But unlike the absolutely experimental (and as with most experiments, largely unsuccessful)
Flowers of Romance, Metal
Box doesn’t go beyond rock so much as stretch it to its furthest extent, in
the manner of the Stooges’s Fun House
or Can’s Tago Mago. It’s a forbidding listen, for sure, but only
because of its intensity, not because it’s abstract or structurally convoluted.
The format is classic: guitar-bass-drums-voice (augmented intermittently by keyboards
and electronics). The rhythm section
(Jah Wobble and a succession of drummers) is hypnotically steady and physically
potent. The guitarist (Keith Levene) is a veritable axe-hero, as schooled and
as spectacular as any of the pre-punk greats. And the singer, while unorthodox
and edging off-key, pours it all out in a searing catharsis that recalls
nothing so much as solo John Lennon and the intersection he found between the
deeply personal and the politically universal. Also, there’s even some tunes
here!

But yes, it’s a bracing listen, Metal Box, and nowhere more so than on the opening dirge
“Albatross”. 11 minutes-long, leaden in tempo, the song is clearly designed as
a test for the listener (get through this and it’s plain sailing!) just like the
protracted assault of “Theme” that launched First
Edition had been. Absolutely
pitiless music (Levene hacking at his axe like an abattoir worker, Wobble rolling out a looped tremor of a
bassline) is matched with utterly piteous singing: Lydon intones accusations
about an oppressive figure from his past, perhaps the master-manipulator
McLaren, possibly his dead friend Vicious, conceivably “Johnny Rotten” himself
as a burden he can’t shake. “Memories”,
the single that preceded Metal Box’s November
’79 release, is more sprightly: brisk funk over which Levene’s
cracked-kaleidoscope guitar scatters glassy splinters. Like “Albatross,” though, the song is an embittered
exorcism: Lydon could almost be commenting on his own nagging vocal and fixated
lyrics with the line “dragging on and on and on and on and on and on and ON,” then spits
out “this person’s had enough of useless
memories” over a breath-taking disco-style breakdown.

With “Swan Lake”, a retitled remix of the single “Death
Disco,” Lydon is possessed by an unbearable memory that he doesn’t want to
forget: the sight of his mother dying in slow agony from cancer. If the wretched grief of the lyric - “silence
in her eyes”, “final in a fade”, “choking on a bed / flowers rotting dead” –
recalls Lennon’s “Mother”, the retching anguish of Lydon’s vocal resembles Yoko
Ono at her most abrasively unleashed. On
the original vinyl, the song locks into an endless loop on the phrase “words
cannot express.” But “Swan Lake” - named after the Tchaikovsky melody that Levene
intermittently mutilates - is nothing if not a 20th Century
expressionist masterpiece: the missing link between Munch’s “The Scream” and
Black Flag’s “Damaged I”.

Just as placing “death” in front of “disco” was an attempt
to subvert the idea of dancefloor escapism, the title “Poptones” drips with
acrid irony. A real-life news story of abduction,
rape and escape inspired the lyric, with one detail in particular triggering
Lydon’s imagination: the victim’s memory of the bouncy music streaming out of
the car’s cassette player. This juxtaposition of manufactured happiness and absolute horror is
a typically postpunk move, exposing pop as
a prettified lie that masks reality’s raw awfulness: for some postpunk groups, an existential condition (dread, doubt) and for
others, a political matter (exploitation,
control). On “Poptones” this
truth-telling impulse produces one of Lydon’s most vivid lyrics (“I don’t like
hiding in this foliage and peat/It’s wet and I’m losing my body heat” ), supported
and surrounded by music that’s surprisingly pretty, in an eerie, insidious sort
of way. Wobble’s sinuously winding bass weaves through Levene’s cascading
sparks as well as the cymbal-smash spray he also supplies (PiL being temporarily
drummerless during this stage of the album’s spasmodic recording).

With PiL still between drummers, on “Careering” it’s Wobble’s
who doubles-up roles, pummeling your ribcage with his bass and bashing the kit
like a metalworker pounding flat a sheet
of steel. Levene swaps guitar for
swooping smears of synth, while Lydon’s helicopter-eye vision scans the border zone
between Ulster and the Irish Republic: a terrorscape of “blown into breeze”
bomb victims and paramilitary paranoia. “Careering” sounds like nothing else in
rock and nothing else in PiL’s work – as with several other songs on Metal Box, it could have spawned a whole
identity, an entire career, for any other band.

“No Birds Do Sing”, unbelievably, surpasses the preceding
five songs. Levene cloaks the murderous
Wobble-Dudanksi groove with a toxic cloud of guitar texture. Lydon surveys an English suburban scene whose
placidity could not be further from troubled Northern Ireland, noting in sardonic
approval its “bland planned idle luxury” and “well intentioned rules” (rolling
the ‘r’ there in a delicious throwback to classic Rotten-style singing). For “a layered mass of subtle props” and “a
caviar of silent dignity” alone, Lydon ought to have the 2026 Nobel locked
down.

After the greatest six-song run in all of postpunk, Metal
Box’s remainder is merely (and mostly) excellent, moving from the juddery
instrumental “Graveyard” (oddly redolent of Johnny Kidd’s early British rock’n’roll
classic “Shakin’ All Over”) through the rubbery-bassline waddle of “The Suit”
to the stampeding threat of “Chant”, a savage snapshot of 1979’s tribal street
violence. The album winds down with the
unexpected respite and repose of “Radio Four”, a tranquil instrumental entirely
played by Levene: just a tremulously poignant and agile bassline overlaid with reedy
keyboards that swell and subside like surges of emotion. The title comes from the
U.K.’s national public radio station, a civilized and calming source of news,
views, drama and light comedy beamed out to the British middle classes. As with
“Poptones,” the irony is astringent.

Listening to (and reviewing) Metal Box in a linear sequence goes against PiL’s original intent,
of course. As the flatly descriptive, deliberately demystified title indicates,
Metal Box initially came in the form
of a circular canister containing three 45 r.p.m 12-inches – for better sound, but also to
encourage listeners to play the record in any order they chose, ideally listening to it in short bursts rather
than in a single sitting. But what once
seemed radically anti-rockist (“deconstruct the Album!”) is now a historical
footnote, because anyone listening to a CD or other digital format can rearrange
the contents however they wish. And if
you do doggedly listen to Metal Box in
accordance with its given running order, what comes across strongly now is its sheer
accumulative power as an album. That in turn accentuates the feeling that this
is a record that can be understood fairly easily by a fan of, say, Led Zep. It
works on the same terms as Zozo: a thematically coherent suite of physically
imposing rhythm, virtuoso guitar violence, and impassioned singing. Lydon would
soon enough ‘fess up to his latent rockism on 1986’s hard-riffing Album (also reissued as a deluxe box set
at this time) on which he collaborated with Old Wave musos like ex-Cream
drummer Ginger Baker. That incarnation of PiL even performed Zep’s “Kashmir” in
concert.

Listening to Metal Box
today, the studio-processing – informed by PiL’s love of disco and dub – that
felt so striking at the time seems subtle and relatively bare-bones, compared
to today’s norms. As the Manchester
concert and some wonderfully vivid live-in-the-studio versions from the BBC
rock program The Old Grey Whistle Test
prove, PiL could recreate this music onstage (despite that fumbled “Public
Image”). Levene, especially, was
surprisingly exact when it came to reproducing the guitar parts and textures
captured in the studio. Even the band’s debts
to reggae and funk can be seen now as a continuation of the passion for black
music that underpinned the British rock achievement of the Sixties and first-half of the Seventies –
that perennial impulse to embrace the
formal advances made by R&B and complicate them further while adding Brit-bohemian
concerns as subject matter. If PiL’s immediate
neighbors are The Pop Group and The Slits, you could also slot them alongside The
Police: great drummer(s), roots-feel
bass, inventively textured guitar, a secret prog element (Levene loved Yes, Lydon adored Peter Hammill) and an emotional
basis in reggae’s yearnings and spiritual aches.

Metal Box is a
landmark, for sure. But like Devil’s Tower, the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it’s
an oddly isolated one. In marked contrast to Joy Division, PiL’s spawn was
neither legion nor particularly impressive (apart from San Francisco’s
wonderful Flipper). Nor would PiL’s core three ever come close to matching
the album’s heights in their subsequent careering (Wobble being the most
productive, in both copiousness and quality).
I was apprehensive about listening to this album again, fearing that it
had faded or dated. But this music still sounds new and still sounds true to
me: as adventurous and as harrowingly
heart-bare as it did when I danced in the dark to it, an unhappy 16-year-old. Metal
Box stands up. It stands for all time.

Thursday, December 21, 2017

SEEFEEL

Quique

(Too Pure)

Melody Maker, December
1993

by Simon Reynolds

As titles go
"Quique" lies somewhere between mid-period Cocteaus and Aphex Twin's
scientific arcana. "Quique" is perfectly blank, utterly
abstract: it looks nice on the page, feels nice in the mouth, and that's what
counts. And as part of the post-rock, post-techno ambient thang, Seefeel are
all about abstraction. Just as the trajectory of abstract art involved
the liberation of colour from line and figure, so the trajectory of psychedelia
has involved the liberation of timbre / texture from the contours of song and riff. So if A.R. Kane were late
Matisse (oceanic

mysticism, blocs of
garish colour) and MBV shift between action-painting chaos and Klee naivete,
then Seefeel induce the same kind of serene exaltation of the soul as Rothko's
lambent, blurry canvases.

"Climactic Phase No. 3" is Seefeel as we've come to expect from
"Plainsong" and "Time To Find Me": over a foetal-heartbeat
bassline, billowing cirrus-swirls (Seefeel's methodology makes guitars sound
like samples, the synth like a choir, and the human voice like a sequencer),
weave

together to form a
shimmering outerspace/innerspace wombscape. It's hard to say why some pieces
feel like blissful suspension from reality, while others (the clangorous
"Polyfusion") are like watching the proverbial Dulux dry. All the
tracks are equally uneventful, sifting'n' shifting layers, ending arbitrarily
and "inconsequentially".

"Industrious" is almost urgent, its surging bass-drum axis swathed in
striated guitar that hums like massed bombers on the horizon. But the female
vocal sounds a tad too monastic (at times Seefeel lapse into being a mere
techno-conscious Slowdive). Then a track like "Imperial"
follows to

chase away all
reservations: squiggle-shivers of iridescence braid together to conjure a
prolonged mind-spasm, like the brain being flooded with endorphins.
Pillowy, heaven-scented, soft as snow but warm inside, "Plainsong"
demonstrates Seefeel's art of turning a pinnacle into a plateau.
"Charlotts Mouth" also aches, but with anguish not
ecstasy. Desolate dub bass, forlorn girl-vox, gently weeping

guitar: this is almost
the blues they're oozing, but A.R. Kane style (harrowed by the terror of
beauty, the way possession can be pierced through by the presentiment of
loss). "Through You" is like Aphex in alien mode: strange
rubbery squeaks and glassy clinks offset by portentous crests

of sound building to a
pitch of mournful majesty.

The last two tracks
show Seefeel stretching out from their own formula, and that's a good augury.
On "Filter Dub", the way different threads (frayed guitar, lovesick
whalesong etc) twine together, hitting a harmonic G-Spot every couple of bars,
is like doowop orchestrated by drone-meister Terry Riley.
"Signals" is Seefeel at their most radical and radiant. Fuzzy
harmonics, like a harp played

underwater, simply
hang tremulously in the air: this really is Rothko'n'roll.

Seefeel sometimes need
a bit more space in their sound, a bit of emptiness to punctuate the
drone-swarm. Like MBV on "Loveless", they're sometimes so blissed
it's suffocating, like drowning in mother's milk. But overall,
"Quique" is consummate, a blanched canvas for the imagination, and a

cracking debut.

Seefeel

Quique

(Caroline)

Spin, June 1994

by Simon Reynolds

Whatever happened to "dream pop"? Well, the smartest
of those bands have turned on to techno, and are mixing their lustrous guitar
stuff with sampled pulses and sequenced hypno-rhythms.

My Bloody Valentine showed the way with 1991's Loveless,
on which it looped its basslines and sampled its own feedback. The best of the
new techno-affiliated dream-popsters, Seefeel, has struck a sublime groove
midway between MBVs sensual tumult and Aphex Twin's ambient serenity.

At its most radical, Seefeel abandons songs and beats
altogether, leaving a dyslexic shimmer of radiance that's like a musical
equivalent of Op Art. With 'Imperial' and the purely ambient 'Signals', you
squint your ear in order to bring the music into focus before giving up and
basking in the gorgeous, amorphous flow.

Seefeel makes a sound like the pleasant ache of a post-orgasmic
brain, like the dizzy drone-swarm of butterflies in the stomach. Quique should
be subtitled "Songs For Swooning Lovers."

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Head On is a twisted, tripped-out brother to Les Rhythmes Digitales Eighties-influenced
Darkdancer. But where Jacques LeCont's
fond exhumations of Shannon and Nik Kershaw are
typical French retro-kitsch, Super_Collider
treat Eighties electro-funk as

a prematurely
curtailed modernism. This English duo (producer Cristian Vogel and singer
Jamie Lidell) pick up where Zapp's "More Bounce To The Ounce", George Clinton's
"Atomic Dog," and Janet Jackson/Jam & Lewis's "Nasty"
left off. This era of dance music just before sampling totally took
over fascinates because of its crush collision between
trad musicianship and futurism: you can
hear the players struggling to extract funk from
unwieldy and unyielding drum machines, sequencers and synths. Hence the apparent

paradox
whereby the best Eighties dancepop still
sounds amazingly modern while much contemporary
dance music sounds retro--because today's producers get their funk by proxy, through
sampling Seventies sources like vintage disco loops or jazz-funk licks.

Head On gets me flashing on the boogie wonderland of the post-disco, pre-house interregnum--the
bulbous synth-bass and juicy-fruit keyboard licks of Gap Band, Steve Arrington, Man
Parrish, D-Train, SOS Band. But as you'd expect from someone who records solo for
avant-techno labels Mille Plateaux and Tresor, Vogel's version of bodymusic is
decidedly mangled and alienated-sounding, while Lidell croons a kind of cyborg
hypersoul--grotesquely mannered,
FX-warped, yet queerly compelling. Head On's highlight "Darn (Cold Way O' Lovin')" has a groove that bucks and writhes like a
rutting hippotamus.
"Take Me Home" is robo-Cameo,
featuring a digitized equivalent of slap-bass and Lidell's most
blackface warbling (imagine a bionic
Steve Winwood). And "Alchemical Confession"
is the kind of black rock I always hoped Tackhead or Material would deliver, all acrid guitar
squalls and Lidell flailing like Jamiroquai in a meatgrinder (now that's something I'd pay to see).

A few years ago, Vogel released
an EP called "We Equate Machines With Funkiness".
Funk has always existed in the biomechanical zone between James Brown
aspiring to be a sex-machine and Kraftwerk finding the libidinous pulse within the
strict-time rhythms of automobiles and trains. When a band's playing has too
much fluency and human
feel, you don't get the tensile friction
that defines da funk (which is why an
excess of jazz influence
sounds the death-knell for any dance genre's ass-grind appeal). Super_Collider,though, have a
perfect grasp on funk's uncanny merger of supple and stiff, loose and tight.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

What we
have here is a damn-dear definitive
history of the genre '91-'95, ardkore to
art-core. Taking in happy, dark-side, ambient and drum & bass, this
two-disc set only shortchanges us vis-a-vis ruffneck ragga. And it gets round
the problem of being comprehensive yet avoiding redundancy (given the excessive
number of jungle compilations in existence), by A/ including unusual mixes of
key tracks that have appeared elsewhere on CD, and B/ dredging up some lost
classics never before CD-anthologised.

Lost
classics like Lennie D Ice's "We Are E", which cheekily turned an
African chant into an anthem for the Luv'd Up Nation. And like the sultry
smooch-core of "Waking Up" by Nicolette (now of Massive, then of the
Shut Up and Dance stable), and of Manix's unbearably tender "You Held My
Hand". Lost-est and classic-est of the lot, and my absolute favourite
hardcore track of all time, is Foul Play's remix of their own "Open Your
Mind". With its angel-host harmonies and diaphonous ripple of succulent
synth, this track is as goosepimply as the entire works of My Bloody Valentine
liquidised in a blender and injected into your spine. Midway, the track veers
into the twilight-zone, then turns vicious with a veritable St Valentine's Day
Massacre of rapid-fire snares.

Other gems on Disc One include the
febrile avant-funk of DJ Edrush's dark-core classic "Bludclot
Artattack", as flesh-crawlingly foreboding as stumbling into a voodoo
ceremony; the gloriously garbled "Secret Summer Fantasy" by the
undeservingly forgotten Body Snatch (somebody anthologise their awesome
"Just For U London", pu-leeze!!); plus A Guy Called Gerald's
cyber-tribal "Nazinji-Zaka", making good its mysterious omission from
the "Black Secret Technology" LP. Drawing mostly on late '94 and
early '95, Disc Two is a handy survey of the state of the art-core. The old
skool's rushin'-and-gushin' euphoria has given way to a more measured passion; fusion
and Detroit
techno influences are entering the junglist gene-pool. The result is a sort of
ferocious elegance, best exemplified here by the delicate, deliquescent
melancholia of Dillinja's "Deeper Love", the clockwork-gone-crazy
convolutions of 4 Hero's Wrinkles In Time", and Droppin' Science's
"Volume 2", with its radioactive synth-glow and grotesquely
elasticated breakbeats.

All this,
plus excellent sleevenotes from compiler Kodwo Eshun, makes "Routes From
The Jungle" the most essential jungle-primer for the uninitiated since
last year's "Drum & Bass, Selection 1". It's a history of the
phuture. Buy, buy.

Sunday, December 3, 2017

BEN RATLIFFEvery Song Ever - Twenty Ways to Listen In an Age of Musical PlentyNew York Times, Feb 17, 2016by Simon Reynolds

Few things scream “first world problem” more loudly than the notion that there’s too much good art and entertainment being made at the moment. Yet it’s undeniable that there is something curiously oppressive about the current bounty, something paralyzing about our ease of access to it. TV is one field where what ought to be a boon feels increasingly like a bane: once there were only dozens of new shows per season, now there are hundreds, such that keeping up with the quality output gets to seem like a chore. If anything, the music overload feels even more unmanageable. New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff’s new book is a remedial intervention for our predicament of being able to “hear nearly everything, almost whenever, almost wherever, basically for free”. Every Song Ever is framed as a set of strategies to counter the confusion and appetite-loss that can afflict music fans as they attempt to navigate what feels like a cross between a maze and a banquet - the overflowing riches offered by streaming services like Spotify, unofficial archives like YouTube, music-sharing blogs, and other instant-access sources of sound. Rather than rely on traditional signposts such as genre borders or artist biography, Mr. Ratliff proposes new routes across the teeming landscape: modes of attentive listening based around concepts or musical properties. Some, such as slowness, speed, stillness, and density, are fairly easy to grasp; others, like discrepancy and transmission, are more elusive. Close listening is Mr. Ratcliff’s forte. When he gets right inside what a musician is doing in a particular recording or performance, and how that affects your body or perceptions, the results are usually lovely and illuminating. His studies of James Brown’s “Ain’t It Funky,” Sleep’s Dopesmoker, and the work of João Gilberto and Curtis Mayfield, are precise but never clinical. The chapter “Getting Clear,” dealing with “audio space” as conjured on records by producers and engineers as well as by players, is particularly vivid, encompassing artists as various as Grateful Dead, Roy Haynes, Pink Floyd, Stockhausen and Miley Cyrus. Mr. Ratcliff fulfils the injunction of Manfred Eicher, the founder and in-house producer of the ECM label, to “think of your ears as your eyes.” Another absorbing chapter deals with participatory discrepancies, a concept coined by the musicologist Charles Keil to describe the minute imprecisions in a performance that create a group’s unique feel. Mr. Ratliff advises that the best way to hear a classic rumba album by Totico Arango and Patato Valdés is “through headphones, at night, walking through heavy crowds in Times Square, smelling street food, visually processing the lights.” That’s because the music in your ears will mirror the external environment: “nothing happens in perfect synch or in a straight line”; instead there’s a mesh of “flickering, jostling particulars.” Mr. Ratliff leans towards non-technical terms and unshowy language, which he then nudges towards the profound or revealing. Sometimes that works brilliantly: a passage on the Allman Brothers and the glory of bands with two drummers likens the role of Jaimoe to “a housepainter doing touch-ups, not on the second day of work but as the first coat is applied.” Other times the effect falls somewhere between cute and clever, like when attempting to account for why virtuosi are so often religious: “Perhaps they can’t contain their own pride and gratitude, or they can’t house the gigantic battery needed to power it. They need an external storage space for it, and they call it God”.A larger problem with Every Song Ever is that its premise starts to fade from view – starts to seem like a pretext, in fact, for a fragmented miscellany of meditations on music Mr. Ratliff likes. That’s fine as far as it goes, and readers will often find themselves propelled to YouTube or Spotify to hear what he’s writing about. But I wasn’t convinced that the nomadic modes of engagement with music he advocates would necessarily help anyone grapple with the quandaries of listening in an overloaded era. The categories are so open-ended they might even increase one’s sense of disorientating plenitude. They seem more like exercises one might do after having listened to a hugely varied amount of music over the course of a lifetime. Mr. Ratliff is both wary and weary of genre, which, near the start of the book, he asserts is “a construct for the purpose of commerce, not pleasure, and ultimately for the purpose of listening to less”. Actually, genre terms mostly emerge organically out of communities of musicians and fans. Although Mr. Ratliff announces early on that he’ll refrain from using genre language wherever possible, in practice he nearly always identifies music using those tags: as bebop, happy hardcore, flamenco, dark ambient, nyabinghi. Genre terms are useful, perhaps indispensable; they tell you something. The self-consciously genre-crossing critic – just like the self-consciously genre-blending musician – depends on style boundaries precisely to transgress them and achieve desired sensations of liberation, discovery, an airy cosmopolitan feeling of rising above the rooted and local. Mr. Ratliff uses terms like “comfort zone” as negative concepts, implying that listening widely is virtuous, or at least good for you, promoting a suppleness of sensibility. But fanatical relationships with a particular sound or scene can be just as engaged, just as rewarding. Metal fiends, for instance, find an infinite array of subtle shades in what seems like undifferentiated monotony to non-initiates. This sort of patriotic adherence to genre is something that Mr. Ratliff believes is on the way out, historically. Which may be true, but is that a good thing? The roaming listener who samples across the genrescape is more often than not harvesting musical fruits that were generated by narrowly focused and dedicated purists. In the end, it remains debatable whether there is a right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy way to listen to music. Being an omnivore doesn’t even guarantee increased enjoyment. There are people who derive endless delight just listening to one kind of music, or even a single artist, as Mr. Ratliff acknowledges in a section about individuals he’s encountered who have all-consuming obsessions with Frank Zappa or the Grateful Dead’s live recordings. Conversely, one of the downsides of the age of plenty is that the more widely you listen outside your well-worn grooves, the more frequently you’ll experience disappointment, distaste, or just indifference. More is less.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Moon Wiring Club and DD Denham: music for children, by childrenThe Guardian, 24 November 2010 by Simon Reynolds

"One thing I've always wanted for my music is for it to appeal to children," says Ian Hodgson of Moon Wiring Club. "An ideal listening situation would be a family car journey. I think children would like all the voices and oddness. If you present kids with fun, spooky electronic music, then they might grow up wanting to make it themselves, like I did with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop." Hodgson's friend and collaborator Jon Brooks, aka the Advisory Circle, goes one better with the debut release for his label Café Kaput, which consists of spooky electronic music made by schoolchildren in the 70s.

Brooks and Hodgson originally met through MySpace. They rapidly discovered that they were "probably variations of the same person", according to Hodgson, with a shared passion for vintage 70s and 80s TV (not just the programmes but their incidental music and theme tunes). The friendship soon became an alliance. Brooks has done the mastering for all four Moon Wiring Club albums, including the brand new and brilliant A Spare Tabby at the Cat's Wedding. Hodgson, in turn, has done the artwork for Café Kaput. A full-blown collaboration between Moon Wiring Club and the Advisory Circle is in the pipeline.

The pair are chalk and cheese, though, when it comes to the way they operate musically. A skilled multi-instrumentalist whose music is "98% hand-played", Brooks makes little use of sampling or computer software. The Advisory Circle's 2006 debut EP Mind How You Go (reissued this year by Ghost Box in expanded, vinyl-only form) and 2008's much-acclaimed Other Channels reveals Brooks to be one of the contemporary scene's great melodists, with a gift for plush, intricate arrangements. Hodgson's approach, in contrast, is much more hip-hop raw. Entirely sample-based, Moon Wiring Club is assembled using astonishingly rudimentary technology: a PlayStation 2 and "a second-hand copy of MTV Music Generator 2 from 2001".

Hodgson turned to this crude set-up after struggling with software typically used to make electronic dance music. Because he's a longtime gamer, Hodgson found using a joypad to make music "much faster and more enjoyable" than clicking a mouse. But it still took him a while to work out how to get good results out of a PlayStation 2. "After months of tinkering, I discovered that it's good at sequencing short repeated phrases." Instead of looping breakbeats, Hodgson builds up rhythm patterns from single drum hits. Then he'll weave in sinuous and sinister basslines that are often coated in a dank layer of echo and delay. "I'll place the bass melody around the rhythm in a very 'stereo' way. I tend to see it all in my head as a 'cat's cradle'. Then if you add delay to the bass and time it right you get extra little melodies inside this structure. They sort of bounce and react with each other. Add melody and atmosphere to it and you get another interlocking structure – slightly organic, soggy, bouncy and knackered."

Moon Wiring Club often resembles trip-hop if its "vibe" was sourced not in obscure funk and jazz-fusion records but from the incidental music to The Prisoner, Doctor Who and The Flumps. Vocal samples are a huge part of Moon Wiring Club. Always spoken not sung, and always British in origin, they're derived largely from videos and DVDs of bygone UK television series such as Casting the Runes, Raffles and Ace of Wands. A scholar of "vintage telly", Hodgson can discourse at persuasive length about the superiority of British theatrical-turned-TV thesps such as Julian Glover and Jan Francis over American actors like Harrison Ford. He recently dedicated a podcast mix to 70s voiceover deity and Quiller star Michael Jayston.

Moon Wiring Club originally evolved out of what was intended to be "a peculiar children's book", Strange Reports from a Northern Village." That project got stalled but it did spawn the Blank Workshop website, based on an imaginary town called Clinksell, which has its own brand of confectionery, Scrumptyton Sweets, and a line of fantasy fiction, Moontime Books. The children's book project lives on also in the distinctive graphic look that Hodgson, a former fine art student, wraps around the Moon Wiring releases, drawing on influences including Biba's 20s-into-70s glamour, the strange exquisiteness of Arthur Rackham's illustrations, and Victorian fairy painters such as Richard Dadd. Blank Workshop and Moon Wiring Club is where all of Hodgson's enthusiasms and obsessions converge: "Electronic music, Art Deco, and the England of teashops, stately homes, ruined buildings and weird magic." Not forgetting computer-games music, a massive influence. "There is something about the forced repetition that makes you remember the tunes in a unique way," Hodgson says, adding that in some ways "Moon Wiring Club is meant to be Edwardian computer-game music."

"Still a kid in a lot of ways," is how Jon Brooks describes himself. His journey through music began "at pre-school age", thanks to his jazz session-player father. "Fellow jazzers would come round to record demos or share ideas. There were always instruments and tape recorders lying about." Brooks was proficient on a half-size drum kit his dad bought him before he even went to school. Soon the child prodigy was grappling with guitar, glockenspiel and keyboards, as well as messing with tape recorders and learning from his father about microphone placement. Although his dad died when Brooks was only nine, the son continued to pursue music, avoiding any formal training but studying music technology while helping to teach an A-level class in music technology.

Perhaps his early start with music, along with his later involvement in musical pedagogy, accounts for why Brooks was so intrigued by Electronic Music in the Classroom, an ultra-rare recording that was the byproduct of a course implemented at several home counties schools in 75-76 and which he has reissued through his just-launched downloads-only label Café Kaput. Originally released in a miniscule edition of reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes for the parents of the children involved, this remarkable record is credited to DD Denham, the peripatetic teacher who devised and implemented the course. But the contents are actually the creme de la creme of the work created by participating children. Now retired, Denham stresses that "the concepts were always those of the child. I would help quite a bit with technical realisation, in terms of connecting that concept to a sound. But I always explained to them the steps taken in order to achieve the sound. The children soon picked up various techniques and developed them on their own. So, a little bit of collaboration, but it was more guidance than anything."

Many of the pieces on Electronic Music in the Classroom are disorienting and disquieting, reflecting children's under-acknowledged appetite for the sinister. "Some children would get spooked by each other's compositions or sounds," Denham recalls. "Sometimes an oscillator would emit a loud wailing and lots of other children would gather round the instrument like a magnet, rather than run away. Kids actually love being scared and sound, although harmless in this case, can be scary and thrilling." The reissue comes with the original liner notes, in which Denham recounts some of the quirky inspirations that the children drew on, from a nightmare about nuns, to the unsettling smell of the air expelled from a church organ, to the ghostly flitting figures of poachers seen from afar after dusk.

Then there's The Way the Vicar Smiles, a delirium of drastically warped, vaguely ecclesiastical sounds (what could be church bells, a choir singing psalms). In the liner notes Vicar Smiles is accurately described by its young creators Robert and Luke as "a bit creepy". "The local education authority thought we were probably skating a little too close to the middle with that one," recalls Denham. "You couldn't get away with it now. However, the vicar in question disappeared from his work a couple of years later, without so much as a whisper. Make of that what you will."

Thursday, November 23, 2017

AC/DCHigh Voltage / Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap / Highway To Hell/ Back In Black / For Those About To Rock We Salute You Mojo, 1994by Simon Reynolds

Beats me why AC/DC aren't rated alongside The Ramones as seminal mid-'70s
minimalists. Both have built a career out of flogging a formula. Musically,
AC/DC's rock'n'roll fundamentalism takes the form of stop-start raunch-riffs and
lewd sub-blues rasp, as opposed to the Blitzkrieg Boppers' buzzsaw ramalama and
gabba-gabba-hey. Lyrically, AC/DC's fuckin', fightin' and hellraisin' yarns, like
the Ramones' gonzo shtick, is 50 percent tongue-in-cheek rock'n'roll parody, 50
percent genuine thick-as-pigshit moronicism.

AC/DC and the Ramones both debuted pre-punk, and hit their creative stride
in '76. But one's hip and the other's not. The reason is that AC/DC have no
progeny, whereas The Ramones blueprinted punk. Flattening the syncopation and the
sex out of rock'n'roll, the Ramones inadvertantly created a whole new rock
aesthetic. Whereas what makes AC/DC trad is precisely their strongest point, the
supple rhythm section and hip-grinding riffage: they're a reversion to the pre-
punk, pre-metal days when rock was dance music. AC/DC funk, which is why the Beasties sampled them to def (jam). In fact, "TNT", from 1976's High Voltage, is rap megalomania a decade ahead of its time, with Bon Scott boasting he's gonna "explode" just like LL Cool J in Mama Said Knock You Out, then nominating himself "Public Enemy Number One"!

The RIFF is one of those things that rock-critical thought has no purchase
on. As with the grain of the voice in soul, or the bassline in funk, it's
something you can't really talk about, or explain why one grabs you where
another doesn't. The RIFF is rock's base element, and AC/DC's absolute essence;
it's not Angus Young's solos, but his and brother Malcolm Young's dual rhythm guitars
that are the lure on "Rock'n'Roll Singer", "Live Wire", "Problem Child", "Highway
To Hell". AC/DC also have a great way with a teasin' intro, e.g. "For Those About
To Rock We Salute You."

Other aspects to AC/DC are pretty peripheral next to the meat-and-potatoes
of the boogie. Juvenile is the keynote: this is the band that put the 'base' in
back-to-basics. The bawdy misogny and puerile innuendo can get mighty tiresome:
the VD metaphors of "The Jack", the drooling lechery of "Love At First Feel",
"Beating Around The Bush", ad nauseam.

Then again (returning to the punk analogy), "Rock'n'Roll Singer" (from High Voltage) parallels "Career Opportunities" as Bon rants "you can stick your 9-to-5 living ...and all the other
shit they teach the kids at school". And "Problem Child" (from Dirty Deeds) is as psychotic as "No Feelings". AC/DC's ethos is nothing if not "the truth is only known by guttersnipes". But truthfully, their petty delinquency is closer to Oi! than Class of '77. Imagine Cockney Rejects, but with 'feel' and 'groove'.

An anthology of singles (AC/DC are one of the great singles band) and best
album tracks is way overdue, but until then these digitally remastered reissues
offer an opportunity to reappraise the aged Aussie reprobates. High Voltage is a stone classic, and the rest all have their moments.